It was only about a hundred yards long and it ran straight from busy Soi Asoke on the west to quiet little soi 23 on the east. For its entire length, it was lined solidly on both sides with narrow, dilapidated shophouses that had been turned into bars. The wide porches along the front of most of the structures made the whole place look vaguely reminiscent of Main Street in an old western town straight out of a Hollywood movie. All it needed was hitching rails.
Lek entered Soi Cowboy from the east, the soi 23 end. Two of her soldiers trailed a dozen paces behind keeping her in sight. The other two had already circled around to the Soi Asoke end of Cowboy and had sealed it off.
It was still early and there wasn’t much going on. Some of the hardcore locals nursed drinks at tables on the front porches and a few knots of curious tourists were already cruising, mostly Japanese and Taiwanese men grouped into packs for mutual courage who giggled nervously anytime they encountered a Thai woman under sixty.
Lek picked her way carefully past an open-air beer bar, its dented stools stacked upside down on the battered wooden countertop. A skinny, shirtless old man wheezed raggedly as he piled brown cardboard cartons of Singha underneath it. Here and there, groups of women sat on the tiny stools provided by the street’s food vendors, perched on the parked motorcycles, or just squatted in the street. They ate, gossiped, and inspected the skirts and T-shirts that the street hawkers hauled up and down the soi in big wicker baskets.
Most of the women looked plain to Lek, plump little peasant girls straight out of the family rice fields in the Northeast, dried mud still under their fingernails. It was something she would never fully understand. At night, farang men paid money to run their hands over the bodies of women they would avoid walking too close to on the street in daylight. It made no sense to her at all.
She walked by the shuttered grey building the girl at the Little Princess had described. She glanced at it quickly, saw the two men flanking the doorway, and continued walking.
When Lek reached Soi Asoke, she stopped in the shadow of a tall concrete wall and turned around to survey Cowboy again. All four of her men waited patiently while she considered her plan of attack, weighing carefully what they might find themselves up against inside that darkened building. The girl had claimed that the mamasan from the Little Princess had taken the three farangs there. But why had she done that? She was taking them to meet someone, Lek told herself, answering her own question.
Although the two men sitting by the door were young, they were obviously professionals. Their eyes were wary, hard, and unblinking. Men like that were not there to guard three fumbling Americans and a middle-aged whore, Lek was sure of that. There would have to be someone of considerably greater importance inside to merit that kind of attention. But who?
It was then that the thought crossed Lek’s mind for the first time that Harry Austin might still be alive. She toyed with the idea, trying it on, turning it this way and that. She doubted it, when she thought about it but, if it were true, it would explain a lot. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a foreigner in Bangkok had faked his own death in order to disappear.
One of Lek’s men ducked quickly away at her signal. In a few minutes, he was back again and reported that the two rows of shophouses lining Cowboy backed up to large buildings on both sides. There could be no rear exits from any of them. That suited Lek perfectly and she could feel the tension began to drain away. She was back in control again. The only way out of the gray building was through its front door and into Soi Cowboy. And the only exit from Soi Cowboy was to walk out through one end or the other. Whoever might be inside that building was now entirely in her hands.
Lek sent two of her men down to the opposite end of Cowboy where they found an empty table at a food vendor’s stand and pulled up two red plastic stools. The old man who owned the stand started toward them, but they waved him away. Glancing quickly into their eyes, he retreated without protest. Both men lit cigarettes and settled in.
Lek found a wooden box for herself and pushed it up against the wall. She sat down on it, her other two men squatting watchfully a short distance away, and studied the gray shophouse some more. They had surprise on their side. It would do no harm to wait and watch for a while before they made their move, she thought, just to be on the safe side.
***
AUSTIN chopped away the rest of the bar while Eddie, Winnebago, and Bar stood and stared. Within minutes, eight wooden crates—each of them about three feet square and four feet high—sat lined up on their pallets making a neat row in the middle of the wreckage.
“I hope you had a lot of fire insurance,” Eddie said, looking at the crates.
Austin pushed the blade of his ax into a tiny crack at the top of the crate nearest him. Putting all of his weight on the handle, he wrenched the lid upward until it separated from the crate with a cracking sound. With two sharp, chopping uppercuts, he split the lid away completely. Eddie, Bar and Winnebago all leaned forward together, straining to see inside.
The bundles of American currency were all bound with identical yellow and white paper wrappers, each of them reading $10,000, and they lay in perfect, neatly aligned rows. The symmetrical blanket of Benjamin Franklins looked like a Warhol print.
There was a full minute of utter silence.
Eddie’s first reaction, he was surprised to notice, was no reaction at all. The money seemed more like a movie prop or that play money sold at novelty shops. He wasn’t really sure what it looked like, but it didn’t look like real money. Then the smell hit him the way the smell of a new car spills out when you open the door. It made him dizzy, and he reached out and held onto the edge of the wooden case to steady himself. It was only the odor of paper and ink, he supposed, but the aroma was still unmistakable even after so many years, and it left him feeling a little drunk as he breathed it in.
Fuck, he thought, it’s real.
“I sold the gold a long time ago,” Austin said in a voice that was not loud but made them all jump in the silence just the same. “What’s left is mostly American currency, but there might be some foreign stuff mixed in there, too. All I’ve found so far is some yen, although I could’ve sworn we put marks and pounds in somewhere, too.” He thought about it for a moment. “I just can’t remember where it is anymore.”
Austin’s voice sounded like a man trying to recall what he had done with his car keys.
“Anyway, be careful if you find it,” he finished. “The old US currency is still in circulation, but I think the foreign stuff has been replaced. You’d be pretty conspicuous if you tried to pass it.”
While Eddie was still pondering that, Winnebago tugged at his elbow. “Shit, man. What are we going to do now? We can’t just call a taxi and pile this in the back seat.”
Austin disappeared briefly through an interior door and returned with a sturdy-looking cart that had been rigged with an electric motor. He rolled it up to the first of the crates, wedged its long steel lifters underneath, and hit a button on the handle. There was a brief buzzing sound and the lifters ground steadily up and back until they stopped with a snap.
It occurred to Eddie that he was probably looking at over a half a ton of money, just waiting to be wheeled away.
“Let me show you something,” Austin said, rolling the cart back the same way he had brought it in.
Trailing Austin through the door, Eddie, Bar, and Winnebago found themselves in what looked like a large storeroom. A pile of empty Carlsberg cases was heaped to one side and a mismatched collection of old bar furniture was piled up against the wall. Austin pushed the cart straight across the dim room, hauled it around until it was in front of another door in the far corner of the right-hand wall, and then pulled a heavy ring of keys out of his front trouser pocket.
“You can’t exactly push shit like this down the middle of Soi Cowboy,” Austin said.
He sorted through the keys, selected one, and inserted it in the door’s handle. He seemed to drift away for a moment, alm
ost as if he had suddenly thought about something that was too personal to mention, then he shook off whatever it was, flicked his wrist, and clicked the lock open.
On the other side of the door was a long, well-lit hallway. It looked like a corridor in a modest office building: plain, white walls; black linoleum floor; and wooden doors set at irregular intervals along the right-hand side. The corridor ended about 150 feet away, at a door that looked just like all the others.
“This runs behind some of my bars. I put the toilets back here. Saved me a lot of money not to have to build separate ones in every place.”
Eddie involuntarily glanced toward the packing case on the cart. He wondered how many toilets Austin could have built with its contents.
“That door up at the end…” Austin pointed down the corridor, “will take you out into another building of mine. Used to be a Tex-Mex joint called Poncho’s, but I couldn’t get me a decent cook so I finally closed it. Anyway, you won’t have to go out onto Cowboy to get out of here. You can go right down there, open the front door of old Poncho’s, and you’ll be on a sidewalk five feet from soi 23.”
“What do we do then?” Eddie asked. The floor squeaked as he shifted his weight from one foot to another.
“Fucked if I know,” Austin said. “I can’t do everything for you, boy. I’ll cover your ass as well as I can from here, but once you’re out this door, you’re on your own. Now do you think you can handle that or not?”
Eddie had no idea, not the slightest, but he nodded anyway. It seemed like the only thing to do.
***
DARKNESS had fallen over Cowboy and the crowds were beginning to roll in. A steadily growing river of sweaty white flesh sloshed up and down the little street eyeing the action. A glitzy neon sign near the gray shophouse flickered on—AFTER SKOOL, it read—and a wave of rock and roll music boomed from a loudspeaker system somewhere inside.
Lek took another slow walk by the gray shophouse. The men guarding the door paid no particular attention to her as she passed close by since they were watching a very fat man slumped on a stool at a nearby open-air beer bar. A thin girl who looked no more than eighteen unwrapped a white towel from a plastic bag and wiped the fat man’s face, starting with his forehead and working her way gently down his cheeks to his neck. The man suddenly shouted something at her in what sounded like Swedish, waving his beer bottle in the air, and the young girl backed away, confused. One of the men by the doorway screwed up his face as he said something to the other that Lek couldn’t hear. Then he pulled out a cigarette and lit it, curling his lip and flipping the match off in the direction of the Swede.
Lek stopped in the shadows not far away. It would be easy enough to take them now, she thought, but it would probably be better to wait just a little longer. In another hour, Cowboy would be running full. The street, the bars, and the food stands would be crammed with the kind of customers who wouldn’t be distracted by a little ruckus. Bombs could be going off and small-arms fire rattling in the street, she thought to herself, and the old farangs who hung around Cowboy would just keep on swilling beer, buying drinks for the girls, and searching the night for a little hope.
Another hour, Lek decided. Give it one more hour and we’ll go in.
***
“COULDN’T you let us have a couple of days to get the logistics worked out, Captain?” Eddie asked. “I’m sure we’d find a way to move this stuff without any problem, but we’ve got no way to do it right now.”
“Jesus Christ, you still don’t get it, do you?” Austin snapped, waving a finger at Eddie. “Those guys at the Little Princess weren’t the fuckin’ welcome wagon. You stand here much longer farting around and somebody’s going to be so far up your ass you’ll need a grappling hook to pull them out.”
Eddie winced at the image, but it was very persuasive. “We’ll have to find a truck or a couple of vans somewhere,” he said.
“I’ve got an old Nissan out there some place,” Austin volunteered. “It’s a van, but it’s a piece of shit. Won’t take any weight.”
Eddie looked at Bar. “What do you think?”
“The Ambassador Hotel is near here and the resident manager’s a friend of mine,” Bar said. “I think they’ve got a couple of Toyota Hiaces they use for hauling tour group luggage. But he would probably lose his job if they were gone more than a couple of hours.”
Eddie looked at the stacks of American currency visible in the open crate, and then he looked back at Bar.
“I think I see your point,” Bar nodded.
Bar pulled out his mobile telephone and began to dial. The outlines of a negotiation were already beginning to form in his mind.
Eddie turned back to Austin. “You can go with us, Captain.”
“No thanks, Eddie. I’ve been here so long I might as well stay a little longer.”
“If Lek finds you, and you’re right about her…” Eddie left the thought unfinished.
“Doesn’t matter,” Austin shrugged. “There’s not much she can take away from me anymore.”
“She’ll hurt you, Harry.”
“Not if I see her first.”
Bar snapped his telephone shut. “Done deal. He and another guy are going to drive the vans around and pull them up on the sidewalk outside Poncho’s. He says he knows the place.”
“What did you tell him?”
Bar grinned. “Told him I was repossessing the fixtures from a club that owed me money.”
“And he believed that?”
“Shit, no. But I said I’d give him $5000 to park the two vans on soi 23 with their keys in the ignition and not report them stolen till tomorrow. He believed that.”
***
LEK checked her watch again. It had been almost an hour and no one had entered or left the gray shophouse. The two men flanking the door were still there, smoking and waiting patiently, doing nothing until somebody gave them instructions. That was something at which Thais were particularly good.
It hadn’t taken long after nightfall for Cowboy to soar into full flight. A man in baggy shorts without a shirt walked by wearing a tiny, black bra wrapped around his bald head like a sweatband. Two young girls with golden skin watched him, laughing out loud. They wore red, pleated school skirts, black and white saddle oxfords with white socks, and white blouses unbuttoned to their waists. They had nothing on underneath.
Across from where she sat, Lek counted the farang men pushing through a curtain into a bar named Long Gun. Each time the curtain swung open, she caught a flash of the young girls inside. Most were slim, dark-skinned, and naked except for G-strings. They twirled through a forest of silver poles on an elevated stage, shuffling their feet to uncertain rhythms. Rock music throbbed into Soi Cowboy, its volume rising and falling as the heavy curtain opened and closed.
Lek decided she’d had enough.
So much for the legendary Asian virtue of patience that Westerners mythologized, it was time to do some damage. Stealth and guile had their place, but maybe her male counterparts were right. When you came right down to it, violence and pain were what you could count on to deliver the goods.
She nodded at one of her soldiers squatting nearby. He stood up, walking slowly toward the gray shophouse, and one of her men at the other end of the soi mirrored his movements. After they both worked their way into position, dawdling at a vendor’s cart near the building’s entrance, Lek approached the men sitting by the doorway.
She appeared hesitant and confused. One of the men flipped his cigarette away and snapped something at Lek in Thai as she approached. She pretended not to understand and addressed him slowly and carefully in English, as if speaking to a child.
“I lost maybe.” Then she looked at the other man. “Is this right place?”
“What you want?” he snapped.
“I here for Harry Austin.”
The mention of Austin’s name surprised the two Thais, as it was meant to, and they looked at each other, neither knowing quite what to do. But since the Vi
etnamese men moved so quickly, they didn’t have long to worry about it.
There were two almost simultaneous noises, hardly louder than coughs, and each of the guards took a single silenced round in the head. The Vietnamese swept both boys from their chairs, folded them onto the ground as if they were drunk or sleeping, and quickly filled their places. In the uproar of Cowboy, no one noticed.
Lek was through the door even before the two Thais were on the ground. She crouched in the shadows just inside and silently drew a long bladed knife with a serrated edge from a scabbard under her blouse. Remembering the bag of weapons she had found back at the Little Princess, she waited, silent and motionless, letting her eyes adjust to the semi-darkness.
Thirty-Six
IT had taken barely a half hour to wheel the crates out of the Green Latrine, down the back hallway, and into the empty shell of Poncho’s. Within another half hour, Eddie, Winnebago, and Bar had them all loaded into the two white Toyota vans with AMBASSADOR HOTEL LUGGAGE SERVICE painted on their sides. Bar had found Harry Austin’s old Nissan and pulled it up on the sidewalk in front of the Toyotas to block the line of sight between them and the eastern entry to Soi Cowboy. In most cities, Bar knew, parking on the sidewalk made you conspicuous. In Bangkok, you just fit right in.
Eddie and Bar had talked about where they would take the crates while they were hoisting them up into the Toyotas. After considering and discarding several possibilities, Bar had suggested a motel that a friend of his owned in Pattaya, a moldy beach resort on the Gulf of Thailand about seventy miles south of Bangkok. Eddie eventually agreed that sounded fine, at least for starters. It would be a place where no one asked too many questions and they could hide the vehicles in two of the traditional curtained parking bays until he figured out what to do next.
Eddie knew that cash in large amounts was a major headache to deal with. You couldn’t exactly wheel a couple of hundred million bucks in hundred dollar bills into Citibank and open a checking account without drawing a fair amount of undesirable attention. With a couple of good nights sleep and a little time to think, however, Eddie was pretty sure he could come up with something cute. He had handled enough money laundering cases in his career to have picked up a few tricks of the trade. Actually, he had a couple of pretty decent ideas already.
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